Video games giant Electronic Arts has found itself in difficulty because its products "haven't been good enough", according to the company's president and chief operating officer.

The world's biggest games publisher has long been one of the most powerful forces in the industry, with a string of hits including the Fifa football series and The Sims.

But after more than a decade of unparallelled success the company is struggling to win over gamers, recently announcing a $1bn loss for the previous financial year and slashing 1,100 jobs.

Speaking to the Guardian at the E3 conference in Los Angeles, John Pleasants – the company's president and chief operating officer – said that EA had failed to produce hits and suggested that the quality of some games had suffered in recent years.

"If you go back three years, EA would have had 10 or 12 games in the top 30," he said. "Look at last year, and we have four or five. You've got to chart. If you don't chart, in the history of the business, you can't get out from underneath it."

Pleasants, who joined Electronic Arts last March, said the company had lost focus and failed to improve its products in recent years.

"Our hits haven't been good enough," he said. "Maybe we didn't market them right, maybe they're not innovative enough. Maybe they're not positioned correctly, maybe the quality's not still the top, top tier that it needs to be."

"That all needs to be worked out of the system so we've got big, blockbuster, tentpole titles … I think then you may start to feel a little bit of reprieve from some of the pressures that we've been under."

Pleasants said the company was beginning to turn things around by focusing more on what gamers want, and on building better propositions in fast-growing areas such as online gaming, multiplayer titles and the Nintendo Wii.

The company's struggles have been in marked contrast to the rise of Activision-Blizzard, the rival formed by an $18bn (£11bn) merger in 2007 between the American and French publishers. Pleasants said he respected Activision's achievements – which include a string of enormous hits such as World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty – but insisted Electronic Arts could not focus on what its competitors were doing.

"I give Activision a lot of credit, they made a lot of smart moves over the last few years that have positioned them to have three hits – not just hits, but megahit franchises," he said. "But I don't wake up every morning wondering what they're going to do."

Pleasants added that EA was considering acquisitions as a way of boosting its presence in some areas.

While recent attempts to buy smaller publishers have not always been successful – including a drawn-out attempt to buy Take Two, the publisher of the best-selling Grand Theft Auto franchise, that ultimately failed – he suggested the company had a war chest of about $1bn that it was prepared to use to secure its future.

"I would consider us to be quite active in looking at things," he said. "In the past we've spent a lot of money on traditional game studios and intellectual property, but I think right now we're looking at a lot of online activities, digital distribution activities, things that can take our portfolio and bring it to new markets, new genres, new platforms."